Opinion
Dear Joe, It’s Not About Iran’s Nukes Anymore
Biden wants to reinstate the nuclear deal, but first
he must confront the new Middle East.
Thomas L.
Friedman
By Thomas
L. Friedman
Opinion
Columnist
Nov. 29,
2020
With the
assassination by Israel of Iran’s top nuclear warhead designer, the Middle East
is promising to complicate Joe Biden’s job from day one. President-elect Biden
knows the region well, but if I had one piece of advice for him, it would be
this: This is not the Middle East you left four years ago.
The best
way for Biden to appreciate the new Middle East is to study what happened in
the early hours of Sept. 14, 2019 — when the Iranian Air Force launched 20
drones and precision-guided cruise missiles at Abqaiq, one of Saudi Arabia’s
most important oil fields and processing centers, causing huge damage. It was a
seminal event.
The Iranian
drones and cruise missiles flew so low and with such stealth that neither their
takeoff nor their impending attack was detected in time by Saudi or U.S. radar.
Israeli military analysts, who were stunned by the capabilities the Iranians
displayed, argued that this surprise attack was the Middle East’s “Pearl
Harbor.”
They were
right. The Middle East was reshaped by this Iranian precision missile strike,
by President Trump’s response and by the response of Israel, Saudi Arabia and
the United Arab Emirates to Trump’s response.
A lot of
people missed it, so let’s go to the videotape.
First, how
did President Trump react? He did nothing. He did not launch a retaliatory
strike on behalf of Saudi Arabia — even though Iran, unprovoked, had attacked
the heart of Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure.
A few weeks
later Trump did send 3,000 U.S. troops and some antimissile batteries to Saudi
Arabia to bolster its defense — but with this message on Oct. 11, 2019: “We are
sending troops and other things to the Middle East to help Saudi Arabia. But —
are you ready? Saudi Arabia, at my request, has agreed to pay us for everything
we’re doing. That’s a first.”
It sure was
a first. I’m not here to criticize Trump, though. He was reflecting a deep
change in the American public. His message: Dear Saudis, America is now the
world’s biggest oil producer; we’re getting out of the Middle East; happy to
sell you as many weapons as you can pay cash for, but don’t count on us to
fight your battles. You want U.S. troops? Show me the money.
That clear
shift in American posture gave birth to the first new element that Biden will
confront in this new Middle East — the peace agreements between Israel and the
United Arab Emirates, and between Israel and Bahrain — and a whole new level of
secret security cooperation between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which will likely
flower into more formal relations soon. (Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of
Israel reportedly visited Saudi Arabia last week.)
In effect,
Trump forced Israel and the key Sunni Arab states to become less reliant on the
United States and to think about how they must cooperate among themselves over
new threats — like Iran — rather than fighting over old causes — like
Palestine. This may enable America to secure its interests in the region with
much less blood and treasure of its own. It could be Trump’s most significant
foreign policy achievement.
But a key
result is that as Biden considers reopening negotiations to revive the Iran
nuclear deal — which Trump abandoned in 2018 — he can expect to find Israel,
Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates operating as a loose
anti-Iran coalition. This will almost certainly complicate things for Biden,
owing to the second huge fallout from the Iranian attack on Abqaiq: The impact
it had on Israel.
After Trump
scrapped the nuclear deal, Iran abandoned its commitments to restrict its
enrichment of uranium that could be used for a nuclear bomb. But since Biden’s
election, Iran has said it would “automatically” return to its nuclear
commitments if Biden lifts the crippling sanctions imposed by Trump. Only after
those sanctions are lifted, said Tehran, might it discuss regional issues, like
curbs on Iran’s precision missile exports and capabilities.
This is
where the problems will start for Biden. Yes, Israel and the Sunni Arab states
want to make sure that Iran can never develop a nuclear weapon. But some
Israeli military experts will tell you today that the prospect of Iran having a
nuke is not what keeps them up at night — because they don’t see Tehran using
it. That would be suicide and Iran’s clerical leaders are not suicidal.
They are,
though, homicidal.
And Iran’s
new preferred weapons for homicide are the precision-guided missiles, that it
used on Saudi Arabia and that it keeps trying to export to its proxies in
Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq, which pose an immediate homicidal threat to
Israel, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Iraq and U.S. forces in the region.
(Iran has a network of factories manufacturing its own precision-guided
missiles.)
If Biden
tries to just resume the Iran nuclear deal as it was — and gives up the
leverage of extreme economic sanctions on Iran, before reaching some
understanding on its export of precision-guided missiles — I suspect that he’ll
meet a lot of resistance from Israel, the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia.
Why? It’s
all in the word “precision.” In the 2006 war in Lebanon, Iran’s proxy militia,
Hezbollah, had to fire some 20 dumb, unguided, surface-to-surface rockets of
limited range in the hope of damaging a single Israeli target. With
precision-guided missiles manufactured in Iran, Hezbollah — in theory — just
needs to fire one rocket each at 20 different targets in Israel with a high
probability of damaging each one. We’re talking about Israel’s nuclear plant,
airport, ports, power plants, high-tech factories and military bases.
That is why
Israel has been fighting a shadow war with Iran for the past five years to
prevent Tehran from reaching its goal of virtually encircling Israel with
proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Gaza, all armed with precision-guided
missiles. The Saudis have been trying to do the same versus Iran’s proxies in
Yemen, who have fired on its airports. These missiles are so much more lethal.
“Think of
the difference in versatility between dumb phones and smartphones,’’ observed
Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment. “For the past two
decades we have been consumed by preventing Iran’s big weapon, but it is the
thousands of small smart weapons Iran has been proliferating that have become
the real and immediate threat to its neighbors.’’
That is why
Israel and its Gulf Arab allies are not going to want to see the United States
give up its leverage on Iran to curb its nuclear program before it also uses
that leverage — all those oil sanctions — to secure some commitment to end
Iran’s export of these missiles.
And that is
going to be very, very difficult to negotiate.
So, if you
were planning a party to celebrate the restoration of the Iran-U. S. nuclear
deal soon after Biden’s inauguration, keep the champagne in the fridge. It’s
complicated.
Thomas L.
Friedman is the foreign affairs Op-Ed columnist. He joined the paper in 1981,
and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including
“From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award. @tomfriedman
• Facebook
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário